Fifteen pesos an hour, sometimes twenty or twenty-five in a busier barangay. That is what a seat sells for, and every computer shop business in the country is built on top of that one small number.
Here is the number that decides whether it works: how many of those hours you actually sold today.
A shop open from ten in the morning until midnight has fourteen hours on every machine. Nobody sells fourteen. The distance between the hours a PC was switched on and the hours somebody paid to sit at it is where this whole business is won or lost, and most owners have never measured it, because the only record of the day is whatever is in the drawer at closing time.
The startup guides all stop at the opening. This is about the part after.
Rows of players at a Philippine computer shop in the afternoon, with price boards and a snack rack on the wall
Open hours are not paid hours
Take twenty seats, open fourteen hours. That is 280 machine-hours available in a day.
Now ask how many were paid for. Most shops guess high. Mornings are quiet, early afternoon is thin until classes let out, and the room only fills between four and ten. If those six hours run near full and the rest of the day averages two seats out of twenty, you sold about 136 hours out of 280. A little under half.
That ratio is the single most useful figure you can put on a computer shop business, more useful than the hourly rate, because you can move it without touching your price. A shop that raises its paid share from 45% to 55% has just added the revenue of two extra machines without buying two machines, paying for their power, or finding floor space for them.
You cannot move a number you do not have. For one week you can get it with a sheet of paper taped next to each monitor and a pen at the counter, which is worth doing even if you plan to buy software the following Monday, because the paper week is what makes the report believable later. Write the time down when somebody sits and when they stand up. By Sunday you will know your ratio, and almost everyone is surprised by it.
After that week, keep it running without the paper. Sessions have to be recorded per machine, with a start and a stop, so that at closing you know that station 7 sold nine hours today and station 14 sold two. iCafeCloud does that part on its own: the customer logs in, the clock runs, the charge computes itself, and the day ends with a report instead of an argument about what the total should have been.
Seeing the room as a map helps more than a list does. In the layout view, every PC and console sits where it actually sits in your shop, so an owner looking at the screen sees the two machines in the far corner that nobody has used since lunch, rather than reading twenty rows and doing the subtraction in their head.
iCafeCloud floor layout view showing each PC and console as a tile, with occupied and idle seats laid out as they sit in the room
The electricity line nobody puts in the plan
Every startup guide lists the rent, the units at around ₱20,000 each, the internet subscription and the permits. Power shows up as a vague monthly figure, if at all. It deserves to be worked out per seat, per day, because at Philippine rates it is the cost that quietly decides which machines are worth keeping switched on.
Meralco's residential rate has moved from ₱13.17 per kWh in February 2026 to ₱14.83 in July, and it is adjusted every month. Your own tariff depends on your meter and your area, so read your bill rather than trusting any figure in an article, this one included.
The arithmetic itself is simple. Measure what one station draws, multiply by the hours it is on, multiply by your rate.
A gaming PC with a monitor commonly sits somewhere around 250 watts in normal play. Fourteen hours of that is 3.5 kWh, and at roughly ₱14.80 that station costs about ₱52 a day in power alone, before the aircon, the fans, the router and the lights that serve it. At ₱15 an hour, the seat has to sell three and a half hours just to pay for its own electricity.
The aircon is the other half of the bill and the part most owners underestimate, because it runs hardest on exactly the hot afternoons when the room is least full. If you want a faster estimate than a clamp meter, take last month's total kWh off the bill, divide by the number of days, then divide by your seats. It is rough, it folds the aircon and the lights into every seat, and it is close enough to start making decisions with. (Do it twice, once for a hot month and once for a cool one, and the difference will tell you what the aircon alone is costing you.)
Read that next to the paid-hours ratio and the two numbers together tell you something neither says alone. The corner machine that sold two hours today did not break even. It lost money while sitting there looking busy.
This is the calculation that separates a computer shop business that grows from one that stays busy and broke. Busy is a feeling. Paid hours minus power is a number.
So the fix is not always a price increase. It is switching the back row off until the after-school rush, running the morning on six machines instead of twenty, and knowing which six because the report tells you which ones people actually choose.
Diagram comparing a seat's open hours, paid hours and daily electricity cost
Where do the hours leak?
Three leaks account for most of the gap, and all three happen at the counter rather than on the machines.
The first is the verbal extent. Somebody's hour finishes, they say extend mo na lang, the kuya at the counter nods, and forty minutes later they pay for an hour. Nobody stole anything. The record simply never existed. When time runs out and the machine locks by itself, the extension becomes a transaction rather than a favour, and it lands in the same report as everything else.
The second is free time for suki and family. This one you should keep doing, because a neighbourhood shop runs on those relationships. Just stop giving it away as a promise. Top the hours into the customer's account instead, so the free time is recorded as time you chose to give. At the end of the month it shows up as a marketing cost you can look at and decide about, rather than as revenue that silently failed to arrive.
The third is machines running with nobody on them. That is the electricity section again, wearing different clothes.
Shift handover is where all three become visible or stay hidden. Counting the drawer at the change of shift tells you the cash is right, which is a different question from whether the hours were right, and honestly it is the question most shops never ask. When the day is on the record, the handover takes a minute: the outgoing shift closes, the report shows the hours sold and the extensions given, and any gap between that and the drawer is a conversation you can actually have because both numbers exist.
Every one of these is a habit rather than a fault, and habits are hard to change by telling staff to be more careful. They change when the system makes the right thing the easy thing. You can see the session list on the live demo and check what a full day of records looks like before putting your own shop through it.
Pricing when there are three other shops in the barangay
The first instinct when a new shop opens down the road is to drop to ₱10. Think about the electricity number before you do, because at ₱10 an hour a seat needs more than five paid hours a day to cover its own power.
There is room to compete without touching the headline rate. Piso net units next door work out at roughly ₱12 to ₱15 an hour once you count the coins, and shops that hold ₱15 to ₱25 do it by selling something the coin box cannot: a saved account, time that carries over, a seat that is reserved, and a rate that improves the more you come. (The coin box cannot remember anybody, which is its whole problem as competition.)
Set those discounts to trigger on their own. Once a customer crosses a top-up amount or a number of hours, the better rate applies without anybody at the counter deciding who qualifies. That matters most on the busiest evening of the week, when the person on shift is a cousin who started on Monday and has twelve people waiting.
Night packages are the other lever. The hours after ten cost you the same power whether the room is full or empty, so a flat overnight rate that fills eight machines is close to free money, and it is the most common way Philippine shops turn dead hours into paid ones.
The dead morning is worth its own decision rather than its own discount. Some shops open at ten out of habit and sell almost nothing before two. Opening at noon with six machines saves four hours of power on fourteen stations, and the customers you lose are usually the ones who were paying least anyway. In practice the only way to know is to look at what the morning actually sold last month, seat by seat.
Then there is everything that is not an hour. Printing and scanning, load, snacks, cold drinks. Put them through the same system as the seats so the day's total includes them, rather than keeping a separate notebook for the sari-sari side of the counter. A computer shop business that counts only hours is undercounting itself, and the extras are usually the part with the better margin.
Patch day and the bandwidth it eats
Mobile Legends, Valorant, Dota 2, CODM and Point Blank put people in the chairs, and they are also what breaks your connection on a Tuesday.
A twenty-seat room pulling the same weekly patch twenty times through one subscription is the reason the afternoon feels slow, and bandwidth here is neither cheap nor endlessly reliable. Francis Tungpalan, who runs GetPoint Gaming here in the Philippines, described the change after he stopped doing it that way: "We have about 5 online games that update every week, now we only update the server. Imagine the bandwidth we've saved!"
That is the diskless approach, where you update one machine and let the floor pick it up on the next reboot. A shop that runs it downloads the patch once instead of twenty times, and the machines come back clean every morning without anyone reinstalling anything.
The game licences themselves are the other cost that surprises owners opening their second computer shop business. A shared pool assigns a licence to whoever is playing and takes it back when they finish, so the number you pay for follows how many people play at once rather than how many PCs you own.
Brownouts and the storm you already know is coming
Power interruptions are part of the operating plan here, not an emergency. So is the week in the middle of typhoon season when nobody is going anywhere.
Two things make the recovery shorter. Keep the counter machine and the router on a UPS so that the shop can still tell customers where they stand while the floor is dark. And keep the balances on member accounts rather than in the head of whoever was on shift, because when the power comes back the argument about who had how many minutes left has already been settled by the record.
Storm weeks are not all bad for a computer shop business. When the barangay is stuck indoors and mobile data is struggling, the shop with a working generator and a stable line is the only place within walking distance that still works. Plan the overnight rate for those nights before the season starts.
Street front of a neighbourhood computer shop in the Philippines at night
What the software side of a computer shop business costs
Licensing is per computer. Per-PC pricing is USD 2.50 per PC per month, or USD 2.00 per PC per month on annual billing, which for a twenty-seat room is USD 50 or USD 40 a month. It is used by more than 3,000 venues across over 90 countries, with support available around the clock.
Set that against the arithmetic above. A machine that gains one extra paid hour a day, every day, earns back several times what its licence costs, and the paid-hours ratio is exactly the thing that moves once extensions stop being verbal and idle seats become visible.
Nothing in this article needs new hardware. It needs your own numbers.
Run one week properly and you will have them. Count the hours each machine was switched on, count the hours somebody paid for, read your last electricity bill and work out the cost per seat per day. Then read how the trial licence is issued and put the following week through the system, with every session, every extension and every printout on the record. Two weeks of numbers side by side will tell you more about your computer shop business than the first year of running it on the drawer did.